The discovery of the world’s oldest apex predators in the oceans more than half a billion years ago is a puzzling story that began well over a century ago. We now have a much clearer picture of these spectacular animals, but the debate about their feeding habits continues.

Marsupials have walked on Australia for tens of millions of years, and include iconic species like the kangaroo, wombat and bilby. New methods for studying the genomes of marsupials have revealed some surprising aspects of their evolution.

Ichthyosaurians, the giant predators that dominated the oceans during the age of the dinosaurs, suffered for their long dives in search of food, according to pathologist A/Prof John Hayman of the University of Melbourne.

A study of Australia’s climate and vegetation over 135,000 years has cast doubt on the possibility that the last megafauna extinctions could have been climate-related, while confirming a 20-year-old prediction about the after-effects of the final wave of extinctions.

A synchrotron scan of a 400 million-year-old fish has revealed how far back our own facial structures evolved, and a 28 million-year-old toothed whale fossil has revealed the origins of echolocation in modern whales.

Ichthyosaurians, the giant predators that dominated the oceans during the age of the dinosaurs, suffered for their long dives in search of food, according to pathologist A/Prof John Hayman of the University of Melbourne.

A study of Australia’s climate and vegetation over 135,000 years has cast doubt on the possibility that the last megafauna extinctions could have been climate-related, while confirming a 20-year-old prediction about the after-effects of the final wave of extinctions.